At the intersection of marine conservation and social, economic, environmental and food justice

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Fish Sovereignty

Community-based fishermen are facing tough times as access to fish is being consolidated into the hands of a few. We know small-scale community-based fishing favors jobs, stability and ecological protections necessary for a healthy society. As NAMA says, “Who fishes matters.”

The growing “food sovereignty” movement is all about making common sense decisions for the betterment of communities as a whole, based in the local food system – and fish is food. This movement isn’t treating food as only a moral issue but also as a practical issue. We have to make sure our communities are strong with reliable work and sustainable social bonds, and food is absolutely essential for this. It is not by chance that our country is so divided politically at the same time as small-scale farming, fishing, and food retail are being taken over by impersonal big business.

What’s Happening?

Big business is gaining more ground than ever before, and they are expanding all over the world. Large, factory farm dairy “co-ops” have controlled prices and driven independent, small-scale dairy farmers into bankruptcy, causing many to sell their farms and cows. The industrial, “factory fishing” model is forcing fishermen off their boats so fishing rights can be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Farm workers are treated worse and worse, denied legal protections and endure slave conditions in the fields of the United States. One positive development in creating jobs and healthy communities are urban farms and gardens in places like in Detroit, but whenever real estate developers want the valuable land in which these gardens are rooted, the gardeners almost always lose. Unfortunately, political leaders we rely on to look out for the health of our communities are abandoning their jobs. Not only are they often corrupted by money, but they are weaker than ever and can’t seem to defend us, even if they want to.

Who are our allies?

The local food movement has been growing, but it does not embrace all of the people essential for strong communities that produce and provide food. A group of people in the United States has been joining the global food sovereignty movement. Dairy farmers in Wisconsin, farm workers from Florida and urban growers from New York are joining the movement to ensure all communities have access to healthy, local food and the necessary tools to provide that food.

What is food sovereignty? Food sovereignty is the right of people to decide for themselves how to take care of their food—how to grow or harvest it, how to prepare it, and how to distribute it. Food sovereignty means farmers and fishermen can create local markets, have access to land and sea and participate in democratic regulatory processes. And the rest of the community has access to that local healthy food, creating a society that looks out and supports each other. Corporations and governments are violating our rights when they interfere with a people’s ability to take care of each other and have a solid economy built around food.

The only solution is to build a movement.

With a movement, different sectors cannot be played against each other for small benefits. With a movement, we share supporters and allies, building our numbers. With a movement, the actions we take help everyone involved in their everyday lives. Wins are not abstract or long-term, but should be apparent in our everyday lives. But building a movement like this is not easy.

The obstacle to building a movement is our separation.

One of the problems is that people who produce food are separated geographically and culturally. Farmers in rural areas don’t meet urban community gardeners. Some farmers employ farmworkers and can’t afford to pay them well because farmers themselves are under pressure. Fishermen living in coastal towns and cities might never meet farmworkers, much less identify with them. But the connections are there waiting to be uncovered and no one in the food system can change their conditions if they work in isolation. A hierarchy, with some on the top and some on the bottom, is always a threat—act out and you could be sent back down to the bottom.

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance is overcoming this obstacle through a series of dialogues and consultations.

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance is new, but the people who are in it are not. We have young blood, but we also have veteran minds. We are organizing a series of conference calls for each group of the food system (fishermen, farmers, urban gardeners, and farmworkers) to decide how to pitch their own interests to the other groups. We need some common ground, and we need to find common interests. We want to move forward on work that affects everyone.

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) works to end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control and access over the food system. It is a US-based alliance of food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental, faith-based, and food producer groups that upholds the right to food as a basic human right and works to connect our local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty.

NAMA's note: We are a proud member of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC). We had the option of joining other family farm organizations but joining NFFC was important as their work is driven by the principles of food sovereignty. NFFC has been an important link for us connecting fishermen and fishing community advocates to farmers, farm advocates, food system advocates and the broader food sovereignty movement. We look forward to continuing our work with NFFC toward fruitful changes to how our ocean and land are managed and the health of the food systems into which the fruit of the labors of fishermen and farmers enters.